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The famous portrait of Mao Zedong still looks out over Beijing as though he's guarding communist austerity and discipline. But the Beijing he stares out upon is hardly the city he left behind.

Change is everywhere—in the clothes (you could wear them to the office in any cosmopolitan city); in the increasingly paralyzing traffic (more and more foreign- and Chinese-made automobiles jam the streets); in the electronics (smartphones, smartphones, smartphones); and in the construction (high-rises, high-rises, high-rises). If you scrub off the Gobi Desert dust, which is glued to everything with diesel exhaust, you'll find Beijing's true patina—a mixture of old and new. It may surprise you that you can still catch the glimmer of a lacquered temple or a traditional jadeite bracelet contrasted with the machine-made gleam of chrome and glass.

No doubt it's a calculated gleam. The Chinese government wants Beijing to be recognized as a modern world capital—especially modern enough for foreign investment. Beijing is a huge, burgeoning metropolis, with bulldozers carving the way to its future.

Must See or Do

Sights—Tiananmen Square; the Forbidden City; the Drum and Bell Towers; the Summer Palace; the Temple of Heaven; the Lama Temple; hutong neighborhoods, which consist of quaint, winding alleyways; a 360-degree city view from the top of Jingshan Park; Olympic Park; the Great Wall; Dashanzi art district, better known as the 798 Art Zone.

Museums—Beijing Museum of Natural History; the National Art Museum of China; the Capital Museum of China.

Memorable Meals—Peking duck at Wangfujing Roast Duck Shop; a Xinjiang meal at Crescent Moon Muslim Restaurant; a classic Mongolian hot pot on Ghost Street or at Ding Ding Xiang.

Late Night—Bars and clubs along the renovated hutong lanes or in Beijing's old town, Houhai.

Walks—Make your way up Wangfujing, one of Beijing's prime shopping streets; stroll around the lake in Beihai Park or in the remaining hutongs in Dongcheng District; walk through, across or around Tiananmen Square.

Especially for Kids—Joy City Choyang or China World Shopping Mall for ice skating; the Beijing Zoo and Aquarium.

Geography

Beijing is geographically vast, exceedingly flat and largely treeless (except in parks, scenic spots and areas around the old legation quarter and Forbidden City), with a mishmash of ancient, Communist and, increasingly, futuristic high-rise architectural styles. Sights of interest to visitors are scattered. Tiananmen Square is at the heart of the modern city, but no one would call it downtown. The area east of Tiananmen Square along Chang'an Dajie, focused around the China World Center and CCTV Tower, is a modern commercial business district.

Travel with a good map (printed in both Chinese and English) and have your destinations written down in Chinese characters (ask your hotel's staff to help you). It might be helpful to ask your hotel for this information in advance for the transfer from the airport. For planning purposes, you may find it helpful to know the district where an attraction is located. For instance, Haidian District (Beijing Zoo, Summer Palace) is to the northwest, Chaoyang District (an embassy and nightlife area popular with expats and nouveau-riche Chinese) is to the east, and Chongwen District (Temple of Heaven) is to the southeast. When you're out and about, you'll discover that the city is built along avenues aligned in a grid. Roads may change their names several times as they continue across town.

Several "ring" roads form concentric circles in and around the city, with Tiananmen at the center. Somewhat confusingly, the first is not actually a ring road—it is made up of a series of small local streets. The Second Ring Road (Erhuan Lu) roughly follows the location of the old city wall, which was dismantled in the 1950s. A subway line also follows this route. The Third Ring Road (Sanhuan Lu) goes mostly through residential areas but also hits some major commercial districts, and the Fourth Ring Road (Sihuan Lu) runs primarily through suburbs and residential districts. Another subway line takes travelers along the eastern side of the Third Ring Road and along the north side of the Fourth Ring Road, connecting the Central Business District with the north side of the city. The Fifth and Sixth Ring roads, which visitors are unlikely to use, effectively orbit the city. A seventh (and regional) ring road is being considered.

The light-rail system makes a huge arc across the north of the city and connects Dongzhimen (in the east) to Xizhimen (in the west) through some of the city's university areas.

History

Beijing, planted on the edge of a fertile coastal plain, rose from agrarian roots. Nomadic tribes invaded and destroyed it many times over the course of several centuries, but the city was always rebuilt. By the fifth century BC, the area had developed sophisticated administrative networks under a feudal system. It became part of a vast, technologically advanced Chinese empire that was protected—and isolated—from the rest of the world by distance, harsh terrain and a huge wall.

In the 13th century, the Mongols under Genghis Khan conquered Beijing and ran the then-sitting emperor out of town. Genghis' grandson, Kublai Khan, built a new city at the site beginning in 1267 and made it the capital of his vast empire. This was the time of Marco Polo's travels—a period of extraordinary prosperity and power in China.

The area blossomed again in the 15th century when the Ming dynasty—which succeeded the Mongols in 1368—returned the capital to Beijing after some years in Nanjing. Vast sums were spent to refurbish the city as a major capital, called Beijing ("northern capital"). An immense imperial palace was built, and the Great Wall was fortified and extended by millions of laborers over a period of 100 years. Many of the city's best-known artifacts are legacies from that era, when architecture as well as arts and letters flourished. The Ming were overthrown by northern invaders, the Manchu Qing, who preserved and expanded the city during the following 300 years. Elaborate palaces and gardens still remain from what was China's last dynasty.

A chaotic period of warlord rule followed the downfall of the last emperor in 1911. In the same year, the capital was moved from Beijing to Nanjing, in Jiangsu province, and for a period it was known as Beiping ("northern peace"). Beijing became a flashpoint of political and cultural dissent, expressed in a student-led demonstration in 1919 and calls for reforms in government, women's rights, science, literature and the arts. The beginning of the Chinese Communist Party dates from this time, when a young Mao Zedong worked as a librarian at Beijing University, although the Party's first meeting was officially held in Shanghai.

A struggle for power ensued between the Communists and the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), the leading political force that wanted to supplant the warlords and reunify the country under a military dictatorship. The struggle was temporarily interrupted when Japanese forces occupied the city during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). But after that war ended, a civil war broke out. It ended in 1949 when Communist forces entered Beijing unopposed. The Nationalists (led by Chiang Kai-shek) fled to the island of Formosa, taking the country's entire gold reserves, many art treasures and much of the air force and navy, and founded Taiwan. The People's Republic of China was founded on the mainland 1 October of that year in Beijing, when the city became the capital once again.

During the following decades, Beijing became the center of a new kind of empire. Mao tried to restore central rule, instill self-sufficiency and protect the country from outsiders, as well as to rebuild an economy devastated by huge inequalities. He oversaw the building of huge dams, canals and power-generating stations (instead of grand palaces and temples), but the country remained underdeveloped compared to the Western world.

A power struggle in Beijing between moderate reformers and Mao's revolutionary socialists resulted in the devastating Cultural Revolution that started in 1966 when Mao encouraged zealous Red Guards to root out his political enemies within the Chinese Communist Party. The violent and bloody initiative, which lasted until Mao's death in 1976, resulted in the persecution of many intellectuals and would-be reformers, effectively halting the nation's development. Since Mao's death, more moderate leaders, especially the late premier Deng Xiaoping, have opened the doors to trade opportunities and modernization.

Today, the regime continues in line with the policies set by Deng and continued by subsequent leaders, including current President Xi Jinping. Following its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, China's economic development continues to progress at breakneck speed, to the continual amazement—and some degree of concern—of the rest of the world. Trade, manufacturing, the stock market and real estate have boomed.

Crucial situations still loom: bureaucratic corruption, Xinjiang separatism, human rights, uncertainty regarding Taiwan and Tibet, a huge migrant-worker population, nationwide pollution, urban overcrowding, inflation and an economy in danger of overheating are among the problems that China must resolve in order to achieve its aims.

Beijing achieved its goal of being in the international spotlight when it hosted the Olympic Games in the summer of 2008—the world's first attempt at an ecofriendly Olympics and among the most expensive on record, costing around 1.5 trillion yuan. That was an affirmation to China of its status as a modern nation, ready to sit at the table with the other major countries of the world. But the question is, at what price? Beijing residents and visitors together mourned the death of many of Beijing's most charming historic areas, bulldozed to make way for the construction of glass and steel symbols of modernization as the city turned a new face to the world. The changes will continue to shape the city's character for decades to come.

Potpourri

The city used to be known in the English-speaking world as Peking, but its name hasn't changed. "Beijing" simply follows the currently accepted style of transliterating Chinese into Roman letters. The main university there still goes by its original English name, Peking University.

Beijing is built on strict cosmological principles, with the Forbidden City the center point of a north-south axis, known as a dragon's vein, which also includes Qianmen and the Drum Tower. The Olympic Park, constructed on the outskirts of the city directly north of the Forbidden City, adheres to this axial template. The north-south axis also makes Beijing very easy to navigate.

The eerie humming sound you hear above your head in the springtime is probably a flock of pigeons, whose owners have attached tubes to their legs to make an airborne symphony as they fly.

In late 2007, Fendi hosted the first catwalk fashion show on the Great Wall of China. Each fall, runners take their place to run full- or half-marathons along the wall. There is also a roller coaster-like track that runs along a portion of the wall.

Despite the rumors, the Great Wall of China isn't really visible from the moon.

Many older city residents raise crickets or songbirds in cages as pets to keep them company as they pass the time in the city's parks.

In Beijing, pet owners are not allowed to keep dogs taller than 14 in/35 cm from the ground to the shoulder, and only one dog per household is permitted. Strict regulations are also in place as a measure to restrict the spread of rabies, which has spread among humans in China. Most pet dogs are pekinese, pomeranians, chihuahuas or caramel-colored poodles.

Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect and is known as Mandarin Chinese; it has become the literary and official form of Chinese learned by every child in the country's schools.

In a country with only 4,000 surnames (compared to more than 151,000 surnames in the U.S.), Wang is Beijing's most common surname, shared by about 10% of the city's inhabitants.

The Forbidden City, named so because it remained off-limits to the general population for 500 years, consists of 980 buildings and 9,999 rooms. At one time, it even housed a Starbucks, which sparked a great deal of controversy and subsequently closed.

On an average day in Beijing, air pollution is five times higher than the standard of safety set out by the World Trade Organization. It is common to see locals wearing face masks around town especially when outside; they are not sick, rather trying to avoid breathing in unhealthy particles.

Location

Because China's capital is inland, cruise ships dock at Tianjin, another large city about 80 mi/150 km away from Beijing. There are two ports in Tianjin, but only the Tianjin International Cruise Home Port, located on the southern end of the Dongjiang Port Zone, serves international cruise ships. Passengers embarking from Tianjin should be sure they arrive at that terminal, not at the older Xingang Passenger Terminal, which is now used primarily for domestic travel. The newer terminal is filled with plenty of dining and shopping, as well as an art gallery and a museum.

The drive to Beijing takes two to three hours, but allow plenty of time for traffic. High-speed trains to Beijing depart from Tanggu Railway station, reaching the capital in less than an hour. This is the quickest and cheapest option, but logistics are difficult for non-Mandarin speakers, who must book a taxi and buy tickets from railway employees who speak little English. Train tickets also sell out quickly as Tanggu station is popular with Chinese commuters. It may be most convenient to make use of the Beijing shore excursions offered by your cruise line.